Thursday, February 28, 2013

Staunton, February 28 – Twenty-five
years ago, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt characterized the Soviet Union as being
an “Upper Volta with missiles.” Now, Russian analysts, in response to findings
of a Swiss firm, have suggested that a better analogy might be between the
Russian Federation and a “Nigeria with snow.”

The three differences between these
declarations tell a great deal about the path that Russia has followed over the
last generation. In the earlier time, the analogy was made by a Western
political leader, horrified Soviet citizens, and suggested that Russia’s
military strength was the thing that set it apart from a much weaker country.

Now, the analogy is being made by
Russian analysts, horrifies Western business interests, and suggests that it is
precisely Russia’s similarity with Nigeria on a wide range of economic and
political measures including corruption and government inefficiency that is the
heart of the matter and cannot be obscured by snow.

In an article posted yesterday on the
“Svobodnaya pressa” site and entitled “Nigeria in the Snow,” commentator Andrey
Polunin said that in the view of foreign investors as expressed in a report by
the Swiss Coca-Cola HBC, “Russia stands closest of all to … Nigeria” becaue of the
nature of its political and economic system (svpressa.ru/society/article/64866/).

(That this analogy is now widespread
in Moscow is suggested by the simultaneous appearance of another article, this
one by Petr Svoekoshtny on the Polit.ru portal entitled “Northern Nigeria” (polit.ru/article/2013/02/27/russia/).)

According to Polunin, the Coca-Cola
HBC report makes five basic points.First, for Russia as for Nigeria, state policy is inconsistent and thus
makes investing more risky. Second, the legal systems of the two countries are
poorly articulated.Third, like Nigeria,Russia
has too many different government players for any company to know whose
decision will stick.

Fourth, both countries “historically
have very high levels of corruption,” something that makes it difficult for US
firms, restrained as they are by anti-corruption laws, to operate.And fifth, the lack of clarity in the legal
systems of the two countries makes it difficult to calculate profitability and
thus determine whether an investment is wise or not

These conclusions are hardly
original, Polunin points out. But they underscore the reality that “the third
presidential term of Vladimir Putin – more precisely, the political protests
and growth of tensions connected with it – have made Russia ever more like
Nigeria in the eyes of foreigners.”

“Svobodnaya pressa” appends a table
comparing Russia and Nigeria in 2007 across a large number of indicators to
underscore that even then “the basic social-economic indicators of Russia and
Nigeria were very close.”Apparently,
the article implies and the Western analysts suggest, they have become still
closer in the intervening years.

Polunin asked two Russian commentators for their
reactions, Valery Solovey, an MGIMO professor who heads the New Force Party,
and Ruslan Khasbulatov, a professor at the Russian Economic University and the
former chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation.

Solovey said that the Coca-Cola HBC
assessment “corresponds to the general assessment of the overwhelming share of Russian
economists” The situation is “not simply bad;it is getting worse” because of the Russian government’s policies. “Unfortunately,”
he said, “everything” that the Western risk assessment report found “is pure
truth.”

The factors it identifies make it
extremely likely that Russia “is now at the first stage” of serious political
unrest, with a new round of protests likely to emerge and on “a new basis,not political protest against dishonest
elections but of social-economic dissatisfaction.”That will make the protests broader and
larger.

In addition, increasing immigration “pressure”
is viewed by many Russians as the reason their lives are not getting better,
and the influx of North Caucasians into the southern part of Russia is
affecting social and political attitudes there.Over the next year, Solovey suggested, these various factors are likely
to come together.

The outflow of Russian capital is
also likely to continue “and even increase” for the reasons the report
listed.And that will only make the
situation worse for ordinary Russians, the New Force Party leader said.

Khasbulatov, in contrast, said it
was “madness” to compare Nigeria with Russia. Instead, he suggested, one should
see this report and this comparison as part of a general pattern of Western
opposition to continued investment in the Russian Federation, opposition that
was reflected most recently in statements by George Soros at Davos in January.

Nonetheless, he conceded that there
are “enormous” problems with the Russian economy, and he argued that they were
largely of Moscow’s own making.Relying
on gas and oil exports alone, as the Putin regime has done, “is a sign of a
colonial economy,” and it puts Russia at serious risk when prices fall. “The
faith of the Kremlin that prices for oil will be high eternally stupefies me,”
Khasbulatov continued.

If the influx of petro-dollars
falls, he argued, this will force the government and business to cut pay,
social programs and pensions. And when that happens, people will go out in the
streets not just in Moscow but throughout the country.Clearly, the Kremlin does not understand this
or how to avoid it.

The majority of Russians are
disappointed and distrustful of those in power.“Russian society does not trust anyone, not Putin or the government.”
Indeed, Khasbulatov suggested, “today the real level of trust in political
leaders is comparable to the level of trust in [former Russian President Boris]
Yeltsin in 1996.”

“In other words, it is
catastrophically low.”That is “pushing
Russia to instability,” something foreign analysts fear and is driving them to suggest,
as Coca-Cola HBS has, that Russia today has become “a Nigeria with snow.”

Staunton, February 28 – Unlike ethnic
minorities in the Russian Federation, ethnic Russians are currently incapable
of organizing themselves into a unified force to defend their interests, the
result less of the current policies of the Russian state than of social and
economic change over the past century, according to a leading Academy of
Sciences sociologist.

This weakness is reflected in their inability
to form their own political party, Leonty Byzov of the Moscow Institute of
Sociology says, as well as in the rise of regional identities within the
Russian ethnos and the failure of Russians to organize collectively even in
non-Russian areas where they might be expected to behave as other minorities do.

In an interview with Aleksey
Polubota of “Svobodnaya pressa,” Byzov argues that the Russian government is
the only factor responsible for this situation. Instead, he says, “the process
of the degradation of [ethnic] Russians has been taking place over decades and
its roots are to be found in Soviet times” (svpressa.ru/society/article/64551/).

But
he suggests that this process is currently accelerating and that the
authorities “really do not understand how to solve this problem” and may “no
even sense it.”That is because “they
think only about the present day or in the best sense about tomorrow.” But they
“do not think about what will be the case after a decade or two.”

This
shortsightedness is not limited to the Russian government, Byzov continues. It
is also a feature of the Russian people. And that means that “it is difficult
to say to what extent the process of the degradation of the Russian ethnos is
reversible” or whether it has gone too far for the Russian nation to recover as
a nation.

Besides
the numerical decline in the number of ethnic Russians and the depopulation of
historically Russian regions, Byzov says, there has been “a general loss of
passion, an atomization of society, and the loss of a creative basis which were
characteristic of the Russians over the course of many centuries.”

The
reasons for this disturbing trend are to be sought in the consequences of
forced collectivization and rapid urbanization, in which the traditional
Russian way of life was destroyed and nothing collective was put in its place.
Indeed, Byzov argues, “it is possible to say that [ethnic] Russians as a nation
do not currently exist.”

There
is little or no chance to reverse this, he says. On the one hand, “the return
to the Russian tradition is hardly possible. And on the other, “life in the
conditions of a contemporary city, the impact of mass culture, and the
deepening psychology of a consumer society all are leading to an intensification
of the processes put in play in the 20th century.”

Byzov
says that the argument that the failure of the Russians to organize reflects
their majority status, but he says that argument falls apart if one considers
the fact than even when ethnic Russians find themselves in the status of
minorities in some non-Russian republics in the Russian Federation, “they do
not overcome their divisions” and unite for their interests.

Instead,
even where social science suggests they should organize, they remain “quite
passive.”That is not the result of
state policy but rather “the extremely low capacity of contemporary Russians
for self-organization.” Clearly, “if there is no sense of commonality, then no
national cultural autonomy will help.”

None
of the various proposals for a definition of Russian ethnic identity has found
wide acceptance, Byzov continues. There is no possibility of returning to
traditional culture, and Russian Orthodoxy is seen by “the majority of Russians”
as “a formal identity: when they call themselves Orthodox, people in part do
not know what this means.”

Today,
there is no “clear definition of who is a Russian” either among specialists or
among ethnic Russians themselves. Instead, “identity among Russians to an ever
greater extent is connected with regions or place of residence.” Siberians, for
example, are “more inclined to identify themselves regionally than nationally.”

Many
believe that ethnic Russians will unite because of the increasing number of
immigrants, but this appears unlikely, Byzov says.Rather, he suggests, “[ethnic] Russians are
beginning to retreat and representatives of diasporas and ethnic communities
advance even when they are given formally equal opportunities.”

That
process, which is most in evidence in major cities in central Russia, bothers
Russians, but “no one knows” how to reverse it. One reason it has gone so far
is that in the 1990s, “spheres in which Russians were traditionally stronger – science,
education, and defense – degraded,” and ever more Russians found themselves competing
with non-Russians in small business where “Russians do not have special
abilities and traditionally lose” to other groups.

Another
reason for the degradation of Russians lies in the corruption of the state and
society in Russia, but here too, Russians do not appear to understand how it
affects them.“Systemic corruption is
now a form of existence for society,” reflecting the rise of “informal ties and
agreements.” Non-Russians find it easier to navigate that than do ethnic
Russians.

Indeed,
Byzovsays, “it is perfectly obvious
that a situation of total corruption is more profitable to them than to the
[ethnic] Russian indigenous majority.” But changing that situation will require
more than a crackdown on corruption; it will require both a change in the norms
of society and the values in the Russian community.

Unfortunately,
Byzov says, the possibilities for that are currently limited. Under Putin, he
suggests, “a bureaucracy has arisen which today in essence has privatized the
state,” works for its interests rather than those of the society.But the only way to change that is to
increase political action by the population, something that has not happened.

Russians
remain divided even ideologically. On the one hand, there is “the traditional
form of Russian nationalism, national-patriotism.”But it is confined largely to representatives
of the older generation and “today it has lost its monopoly.”On the other, there are now some national
democrats who want to carve out of the empire a distinctly ethnic Russian
state, a trend that “is still not very popular.”

Obviously,
“nationalist attitudes” are increasing in the Russian Federation and even among
ethnic Russians, Byzov acknowledges. But he points out the gap between the 50
or 60 percent of ethnic Russians who have nationalist attitudes and the four to
five percent who are prepared to vote for groups that articulate them.

Until
that changes – and until ethnic Russians find a new basis for unity among
themselves – no strong nationalist political party is likely to form, Byzov
concludes, the current situation of ethnic degradation of the Russian nation is
likely to continue and, the sociologist implies, may even get worse.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Staunton,
February 27 – Russia’s Islamic community, extraordinarily diverse in tsarist
and Soviet times, has become even more varied since 1991, a situation that
makes nonsense of the widespread view that there is some “statistically average
Muslim” and means that one-size-fits-all policies are doomed to failure,
according to a Moscow ethnographer.

“The uniqueness of Russia consists
that the Islamic regions [of the country] are so very different one from other,
Yarlykanov says. And that variety means that it is almost always a mistake to
assume that any one characteristic or even any trend is true of all its various
components.

Thus, for example, “if we take
Daghestan and to a lesser extent Chechnya and Ingushetia, then in these places
there has not been a rebirth of Islam but rather the coming out of Islam from
the underground.”But if we consider
such regions as Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachayevo-Cherkesia, then it would be
correct to use the term ‘re-Islamization.’”

The same problem exists regarding
the use of terms like “traditional” and “non-traditional” Islam, the Moscow
scholar says.In Daghestan, Chechnya,
and Ingushetia, Sufism is the traditional form, but in other North Caucasus
republics, there was no Sufism. And that in turn means that re-Islamization is
different in different places a well.

Because all these different things
are going on all at once and because they have created “a mosaic of Islamic
opinion,” Yarlykapov argues, it is extremely difficult and counterproductive to
“single out something as ‘tradition’” and something else as non-traditional and
assume that one can support the one or the other in every case.

“Soviet Muslims also were extremely
diverse,” he continues. There were those that many in the West call part of
“official Islam,” which included the Muslim Spiritual Directorates who were
almost “government employees” and their followers.There were numerous trends of independent
“unofficial” Muslim groups who had “complicated” relations with the official
brand.

And there were what many call
“ethnic Muslims,” people who “considered themselves Muslims but new little or
nothing about the faith. Taken together, these constituted what became in the
1980s, “Soviet Islam,” which had little to do with theology but rather with the
flowering of “pre-monotheistic” practices such as visits to holy places.

All of these trends represented
efforts to survive under duress rather than a search for the faith, Yarlykapov
suggests, and he calls attention to one curious reality: The MSDs then, just as
the Wahhabis do today, condemned those who were shifting from attention to
theological truths to pre-monotheistic practices.

The relationship between Islamic
identity and political identity has also changed. In tsarist times, the
religious identity was predominant; in Soviet times, the political one became
more important; but now there is a struggle between them, with some Muslims
viewing Islamic identity as more important but others just the reverse.

Today, the Moscow ethnographer says, “the
overwhelming majority of Muslims consider themselves Rossiyane [that is,
non-ethnic Russians] and is politically loyal to the Russian state. In a
political sense, then, they conceive themselves as part of the [non-ethnic]
Russian nation [natisya].”

But
in addition, there are others who believe “that is it necessary to establish
their own state” and are willing to go into the forests to fight. There are
those who believe that “a compromise is possible.” And there are those who
believe that they must have their own state but that now is not the time to
fight for it.

This
last group, Yarlykapov suggests, resemble “the situation of the ultra-Orthodox
in Israel who do not recognize the state of Israel but nevertheless, live on
its territory.There are such Sufi
groups in Daghestan. They are not large, but one must not forget about them” in
any assessment of the umma in the Russian Federation.

The
MSD system, created by the tsarist regime in the 18th century and
revived by the Soviet leadership in the 1940s today has collapsed, the
ethnographer says.These institutions
“are not part of the state system; in legal terms, these are simply social
organizations without a strict hierarchy.” Muslim communities form around imams
not around them.

The
Russian government does not comprehend this complexity, the scholar continues.
And it has not figured out what to do.“The sad thing is not that the policy of the state is anti-Islamic; the
sad thing is that the state does not have a clear policy regarding Islam,” and
as a result, “each state organ acts” on its own and as it thinks best.

The
relationship between the various groups within Russian Islam and the Russian
Orthodox Church are equally complicated, Yarlykapov argues. These involve in
the first instance concerns about missionary work by one side among the
followers of the other and in the second differences in the relationship of the
faith to those in power.

In some places, this relationship
is relatively good but in others openly hostile. But what is surprising is
this: “On the whole, Orthodoxy and not only its Russian variant to a surprising
degree remains the one Christian confession which on the one hand has a very
serious and lengthy experience of interacting with Islam but on the other hand
has done nothing for developing inter-confessional dialogue.”

Yarlykapov said that he
personally does not see any clear policy about Islam existing in the Russian
Orthodox Church. That Church is angry that “in the North Caucasus, there are
many cases” when Russians have become Muslims, “especially in Daghestan, where
quite a high percent of ethnic Russians have accepted Islam.”

Thus, neither the state nor
the Church has done much to move beyond “stereotypes rooted in a lack of
knowledge about Islam” and neither has helped Russian society to move beyond
Islamophobic attitudes, which are growing because of the influx of Muslim
gastarbeiters from Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

Islamophobia is on the rise
throughout the world, the scholar says, “but for Russia this is a particularly
serious problem,” because a large share of all Muslims there are citizens of
the country and because they form a large share of the population as a
whole.Inter-religious conflicts in
Russia are thus “especially dangerous.”

If Russians can get beyond
Islamophobia, Yarlyapov suggests, they will see some amazing things going on
among the Muslims living among them. A large number of Russia’s Muslims “read
Arabic or at least English and have the chance to become familiar with the
fetwas of sheiks living many thousands of kilometers away.”

These Muslims are part of
the larger problem of “’electronic muftis,’” who are playing an increasing role
in the lives of the faithful and often have far more influence in the lives of
believers than the mullah or imam at the local mosque. “Today it is possible to
go to one mosque but to be a follower of another imam who lives thousands of
kilometers away.”

The Russian academic
community unfortunately has not helped as much as it might, the Moscow
investigator says. While there is no shortage of research on Russia’s Muslims,
there is a severe shortage of high quality sociological work. Indeed, there is
less of that now than there was at the end of the Soviet period.

If one looks to the future,
Yarlykapov says, it is clear that the Muslims are not going to become a
majority of the population by 2050.They
form at most 20 percent now, many Muslim nationalities are not growing fast,
and a large share of the Muslims inside Russia consists of migrants who at some
point will go home.

But if one focuses on
culture, Muslims will be playing an expanded role. “Russia will continue to
remain a country where the most varied cultures exist, including within Islam
itself.”That means whatever some may
think or want that “Russia in the future will preserve all its cultural
multiplicity.”

Staunton, February 27 – Liquidating
the non-Russian republics of the Russian Federation as some have proposed would
threaten the survival of the country’s non-Russian nations as well as the
national traditions and interests of the Russian people and the Russian
Federation, according to participants in a Moscow roundtable.

And those experts add that those who
understand this situation should speak out because so far the idea has been
pushed only by second-level figures, an apparent testing of the waters by more
senior ones, and thus can be stopped before actions are taken that could ignite
serious inter-ethnic conflicts in the country and undercut Russia’s position in
the world.

If
Moscow resumes its program of folding in non-Russian republics into predominantly
Russian regions that between 2005 and 2008 eliminated six autonomous districts,
the participants said, that would be “an extraordinarily serious step” that
would require changing the Russian Constitution, something most Russian
politicians have been unwilling to do.

And
it would trigger opposition among the non-Russian nationalities especially
those who would be likely to conclude that the only way to prevent this change
would be public protest and in international organizations because Moscow is a
signatory to many accords committing it to protect the rights of minorities.

Pavel Zarifullin, the head of the
Moscow Gumilyev Center, said that Moscow needs to recognize that “the strength
of the state consists in its asymmetrical nature, its complexity, and the
multiplicity of the systems which make it up” and that efforts to impose a
spurious homogeneity would only undermine its power.

Unfortunately, he continued, at
present, anyone, regardless of how little he understands about the nationality question,
is free to make proposals that may be dangerous to the country. And the
Gumilyev Center head said that is exactly what Mikhail Prokhorov and others who
have called for doing away with the non-Russian republics have done.

And unfortunately too, Zarifullin
continued, these proposals are not given the assessments they deserve.“No one,” he said, had yet done so in the
case of Prokhorov, and he suggested that the current roundtable was thus a
necessary corrective because “it is time for society to give its assessment” of
such dangerous ideas.

Rustem Vahitov, a Moscow commentator
who writes frequently on nationality issues, suggested in his remarks that “if
a decision will be taken to do away with the national autonomies,” that will
intensify nationalisms of all kinds, leave to national conflicts, and threaten
smaller peoples with assimilation and the loss of their culture and language.

Ramazan
Alpaut, deputy chairman of the Russian Congress of the Peoples of the Caucasus,
said that there was a worldwide trend toward greater not lesser autonomy for
ethnic minorities. He also noted that most of the republics of the Russian
Federation “which are considered mono-ethnic” in Russia are not so “according
to European standards.” For example, Chechnya
is not completely Chechen because “about 20,000 Kumyks live there.”

Brontoy Bedyurov, a spiritual leader
from the Altay, said that those proposing to redraw the map of Russia failed to
recognize that Russia is not “a mono-ethnic state” andto undertand that it has “never been based on
the principles of nationalism and the rule of one ethnos over others.”

Magomed Omarov, vice president of
the Kontinent Foundation for Ethno-Political Research, said that calls for
doing away with the non-Russian republics “are dangerous because they reflect
definite tendencies in society.”But he
noted that they “contradict the official documents of the Russian Federation
and the interests of the state.”

Denis Sokolov, the head of the
RAMCOM Center for Social-Economic Research on the Regions, noted that those who
propose eliminating the non-Russian republics forget that “the overwhelming
majority” of predominantly Russian regions are not economically self-sufficient
either.

Yevgeny Bahrevsy, a senior research
at the Russian Institute of Strategic Research (RISI), said that those who want
to do away with the non-Russian republics focus only on economics rather than
on broader questions of culture and politics. Whatever problems exist in the
non-Russian republics, territorial divisions elsewhere also have their
drawbacks.

Zeydulla Yuzbekov, a professor at
Moscow State University, said that Russia had always been “a center of
attraction” for peoples around the world because of its diversity. Doing away
with the non-Russian republics would undercut that. Consequently, everyone
should remember that “a beautiful bouquet always consists of various flowers.”

And Aliy Totorkulov, the president
of the Russian Congress of Peoples of the Caucasus, said that the notion that
the non-Russian republics should be eliminated reflected a dangerous tendency
to elevate economics above everything else rather than recognize that it is only
one factor among many that a state must consider.”

In its reports on this meeting, the
Gumilyev Center suggested that despite their diversity of opinion on many
issues, the roundtable participants were united in their conviction that Russia
must not become a “melting pot” of peoples “in which unique national cultures
will disappear” and that Moscow must make their survival “a priority task.”

To do so, the Gumilyev Center
suggested, would “correspond with the historical traditions of Russia, the
mentality of the Russian people, and the pragmatic interests of the
contemporary Russian Federation.” Obviously, “problems in the republics exist,”
but trying to solve them by doing away with the republics would lead to “still
greater problems.”

What
makes this roundtable’s conclusions particularly important, of course, is that
its defense of the non-Russian republics comes from a group with broad ties to
many parts of the Russian nationalist spectrum.And that suggests any new push by the Kremlin to amalgamate the
republics will be opposed by groups many assume would be its most enthusiastic
supporters.